The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is performing better than expected, and that might be a problem for some of the early results. An update to our understanding of how one of its cameras is working may mean that many galaxies spotted in the early data are not as distant as they seem.
When JWST sends data back to Earth, it doesnāt come as complete images. Astronomers have to process it to make it usable, which requires understanding the sensitivity of the telescopeās scientific instruments. As JWST takes more data, we gain a better understanding of that sensitivity. But new information on the performance of an infrared camera caused the telescopeās operators to update its data-processing algorithms in July ā well after the first images were released ā and this threw some astronomers into a tizzy.
āWhen the first images came out, it was a bit of an āastronomers at Christmasā scenario with everyone diving in to see what they could find,ā said at the University of Manchester, UK, in a statement. āWhat I think flew under the radar of a lot of astronomers was a part of that report mentions that NIRCam (one of the main cameras on the telescope) was overperforming in its reddest wavelengths.ā
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This is important because astronomers use the colour of an objectās light to measure its distance. The faster a galaxy is moving away from us, the redder its light appears. Because of the expansion of the universe, more distant galaxies move away from us faster, making them appear redder. Adams and his colleagues re-analysed some early JWST data after the update and found that some galaxies are actually less red ā and correspondingly less distant ā than they initially appeared.
āItās potentially a very big deal,ā says at the University of California, Los Angeles. āThe data that we got is revolutionary and is great, but our understanding of the data is not.ā It may mean that some of the early science coming from JWST data is incorrect, especially for the faintest galaxies, where luminosity and distance are determined with fewer data points than brighter galaxies. Some faint galaxies may be more than 10 times closer than we thought.
However, that doesnāt apply to everything. āThis whole clamour of āoh my god, everything that everyone has written in the last few weeks is wrong, throw it out the windowā is really not the case,ā says at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. āThis is not unexpected, and many researchers made conservative choices in their work to account for it.ā For work focusing on very bright galaxies in particular, the correctionsĀ that need to be made to researchersā calculations may not be all that extreme, he says.
It may even solve one mystery from the early data: the fact that JWSTās first observationsĀ seemed to show far more extremely distant galaxies than we expected based on models of galaxy evolution. āThis unaccounted for error might be the reason why,ā said Adams. If those galaxies arenāt quite so far away, the tension between theory and observation evaporates.
āThis helps with part of the tension, but doesnāt completely solve it,ā says Roberts-Borsani. āThere are still these bright monsters at high distances where we donāt really expect them to be forming stars like crazy.ā Those bright galaxies arenāt affected as much by the updated NIRCam calibration.
More calibrations will come through from the JWST team in the coming months, but theyāre all expected to be less severe, said Adams. Meanwhile, astronomers who analysed JWST data before this update are going back to double-check their conclusions. āOf course in the long run weāre going to iron all this out,ā says Naidu.
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